Global Security Cultures

Mary Kaldor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509509188, 9781509509171
• eBook ISBN: 9781509509218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere has made things worse? Why do some conflicts never end? And how is it that practices like beheadings, extra-judicial killings, the bombing of hospitals and schools and sexual slavery are becoming increasingly common?

In this book, renowned scholar of war and human security Mary Kaldor introduces the concept of global security cultures in order to explain why we get stuck in particular pathways to security. A global security culture, she explains, involves different combinations of ideas, narratives, rules, people, tools, practices and infrastructure embedded in a specific form of political authority, a set of power relations, that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. In contrast to the Cold War period, when there was one dominant culture based on military forces and nation-states, nowadays there are competing global security cultures. Defining four main types - geo-politics, new wars, the liberal peace, and the war on terror she investigates how we might identify contradictions, dilemmas and experiments in contemporary security cultures that might ultimately open up new pathways to rescue and safeguard civility in the future.

1
Introduction

At the time of writing, there is a general sense of foreboding, rather like in the 1930s: the feeling that there is going to be some terrible worldwide tragedy, just as there was in the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, the tragedy is already happening; refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the bombing of hospitals and medical facilities, the killing of thousands of young men (as well as women, children and older men) at long distance with drones, cruise missiles and aircraft, the use of hideous weapons prohibited in international law like nerve gases, incendiaries or cluster munitions, the reintroduction of sex slavery, the starvation of ordinary people as a consequence of sieges, the use of lorries and aircraft as weapons of mass destruction in crowded cities, or the beheading, forced detention and torture of innocents. These are phenomena that anyone growing up in the aftermath of World War II hoped would disappear for ever. Yet what we are experiencing is not a war in the twentieth-century sense. It is something else.

This book is an attempt to make sense of this ‘something else’. I use the term ‘global security culture’ as a conceptual tool to help us describe or explain what is happening in a way that might open up possible answers. A security culture is a specific pattern of behaviour, or constellation of socially meaningful practices, that expresses or is the expression of norms and standards embodied in a particular interpretation of security and that is deeply imbricated in a specific form of political authority or set of power relations. A security culture comprises different interconnected combinations of ideas, rules, people, tools, tactics and infrastructure, linked to different types of political authority that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. The term ‘culture’ helps to explain why certain practices become normalized or habituated even if they appear to be contrary to logic. Why, for example, sixteen years after 9/11, are military means still being used to attack terrorists when the phenomenon of terrorism is more pervasive than ever? Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when the wars that have been conducted – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere – have made things worse? And why do conflicts in places like Syria or Democratic Republic of Congo never end? Why do armed groups go on fighting when it is clear that they will not win? The argument is that this kind of behaviour makes sense from within the vantage point of the culture, that the culture structures narratives, career paths, material incentives and political power in such a way as to inculcate and naturalize ways of thinking and doing.

The term ‘security’ is used because not all methods of addressing large-scale violence are military. There is much military history that describes different ways of war, what one might call different military paradigms, associated with different epochs¹ – feudal knights, clan warfare, slave armies, industrial warfare, guerrilla warfare and so on. A security culture is similar to a way of war but it does not necessarily involve military force. A central proposition of this book is that the utility of military force has been transformed as a consequence of technological change. Because all military technology is increasingly destructive and accurate, differences in capabilities have narrowed. As a consequence, military force is a very clumsy instrument for imposing order or for what in the military jargon is called ‘compellance’. It is often pointed out that the United States has more military capabilities than all the other nations combined; it possesses well-trained, professional military personnel equipped with the most technologically advanced weapons that exist in the world today. Yet the United States has been unable to impose order in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. As in World War I, conventional battles have become hugely destructive and difficult to win. Towns like Grozny in Chechnya, Fallujah in Iraq and Vukovar in Croatia have been razed to the ground and yet insurgents pop up again when the battle is over. This is not to say that the use of military force has no utility; but it has other utilities for those engaged in military operations than winning or losing – political, psychological or economic utilities – as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

At the same time a security culture is something more than a way of addressing large-scale violence that is not necessarily military. Security is bound up with authority and power. It is only meaningful if it underpins belief in political authority either out of fear or because the culture conforms to subjective perceptions about security. The production and reproduction of security cultures can only be understood in terms of the way in which they are both enabled by and enable a particular set of power relations.

The term ‘global’ is used to draw attention to the way in which security cultures are about ways of doing security or patterns of behaviour rather than about national or ethnic cultures. In the strategic studies literature, the term ‘strategic culture’ is used to describe different national ways of war. My concern is with different ways of doing security that cross borders and that emerge out of the interconnectedness of the contemporary world and, yet, are embedded in power. During the Cold War, the world was characterized by what could be described as a single international security culture. Nation-states and blocs of nation-states possessed regular military forces and associated armaments, and the main threat to security was considered an inter-state war on the model of the European wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The scale of military spending and the number and sophistication of armaments were imagined to indicate how well a state or bloc would do in a future confrontation and this then shaped the hierarchy of power in the international system. Domestically, of course, there were differences between rights-based, law-governed societies and more repressive societies. Today, by contrast, we face several competing global security cultures jostling for position; security cultures that are both international and domestic, ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, and that are associated with different types of political authority.

Distinguishing different security cultures and drawing attention to the different ways of doing security is illuminating for debates about intervention in wars.² There is a tendency to conflate all types of intervention and to assume, at any rate among critical scholars, that intervention should be avoided. But there is no such thing as non-intervention in an era of interconnectedness. The issue is whether the intervention is managed through political authorities – the state or international institutions – and whether it is aimed at ending wars or assisting one or other side in war, and how.

In this book, I distinguish four main types of security culture, although there is a lot of overlap and it would of course be possible to use the approach to identify others. One is geo-politics, the security culture of the Cold War based on military forces and nation-states. A second is new wars, the rise of networks of state and non-state actors associated with sub-state forms of political authority. A third is what I call the liberal peace, the combination of peace-keepers and a range of international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) or regional organizations like the European Union (EU) or the African Union (AU). And the final security culture is the war on terror, involving a new group of actors – intelligence agencies, special forces, and private security actors – as well new technology such as mass surveillance and drones. The war on terror is associated with American exceptionalism although many other countries are following the path set by the United States.

This book is the outcome of a five-year research programme entitled Security in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Investigation into the Security Gap. The programme was concerned primarily with the transition from a Cold War model of security to a different set of security arrangements. What we called the security gap expressed the notion that the Cold War security model no longer fits contemporary times. By the security gap, we referred to the proposition that millions of people live in conditions of deep insecurity and yet our security apparatus, largely consisting of military forces, does not address their problems; indeed it often makes things worse. At the time the project was conceived, still basking in the afterglow of post-Cold War optimism despite 9/11, it was hoped that the project would substantiate this proposition and put forward proposals for alternative ways of doing security. In particular, I was preoccupied with the notion of human security, the security of the individual rather than the state, and how a human security approach might be implemented.

Parallel to our research was a concern in the strategic studies community with the way in which new technologies would impact the military. Both George W. Bush, when president, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the advent of information and communications technologies (ICTs) was as significant for military practice as the stirrup in feudal times, or the combustion engine in the twentieth century. Following earlier Soviet writers, American defence analysts had, for a decade or more, talked about a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Our argument was that the transition is not just about technology. Indeed, as I argue in chapter 3, the RMA ended up in introducing new technology into the geo-politics security culture in such a way as not to disturb existing organizational structures – merely making existing cumbersome weapons systems even more complex and expensive.

So it was hoped that the programme would come up with new ideas about how to address contemporary insecurity in terms of social relations, new ways of organizing, new tactics, new strategies, rather than in terms of technology even though new technologies would be relevant. What became painfully evident during the course of the research programme was how misplaced was my optimism. Ways of doing security are changing but not in the direction of human security. The new wars have made use of new technologies within a very different pattern of behaviour. Armed groups that participate in contemporary wars in places like the Balkans, the Middle East or Africa have been able to organize in the form of loose networks or coalitions primarily as a consequence of improvements in communication. They were able to develop what might be called vernacular technology, for example improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that combine household ingredients with sophisticated triggering devices such as mobile phones.³ And their tactics wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Security Cultures
• 3: Geo-Politics
• 4: New Wars
• 5: Liberal Peace
• 6: War on Terror
• 7: Geographies
• 8: Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement